The Risky Business of Hiring Stars

When a company hires a star, the star’s performance plunges, there is a sharp decline in the functioning of the group or team the person works with, and the company’s market value falls. Moreover, stars don’t stay with organizations for long, despite the astronomical salaries firms pay to lure them away from rivals. For all those reasons, companies cannot gain a competitive advantage by hiring stars from outside the business. Instead, they should focus on growing talent within the organization and do everything possible to retain the stars they create. As we shall show in the following pages, companies shouldn’t fight the star wars, because winning could be the worst thing that happens to them.